War on Terror - 2 comments

I don't quite understand the fuss made about Hilary Benn's comments on the phrase, "war on terror". This is a discussion about rhetoric, not about policy, and should therefore be of minimal importance to most people. Nonetheless, we - as liberal-minded democrats, and committed supporters of human rights and free speech - ought to be just as explicit in condemning things we should condemn, as affirming things we should affirm. To me, the phrase means something like:

Terrorism is the avowed policy of individuals, organisations, and governments around the world; it cannot be justified in any situation: it degrades both victim and perpetrator, breeds future conflict, and those who practise it should be countered with all the means at our disposal.

Or something. I don't share the view that it means:

There is a global conspiracy of terrorists, primarily concerned with destroying The West [this is only partly true], and only military defeat will break it.

Undoubtedly this view has attracted more attention, of late, than the former, thanks to those with a preference for military action, but we're talking not about the conduct of an ongoing "war on terror", but about the aptness of the term, and the underlying commitment of ours to actively and determinedly seek an end to the use of terror worldwide.

Nonetheless Benn continues:

"In the UK, we do not use the phrase 'war on terror' because we can't win by military means alone, and because this isn't us against one organised enemy with a clear identity and a coherent set of objectives.

"It is the vast majority of the people in the world - of all nationalities and all faiths - against a small number of loose, shifting and disparate groups who have relatively little in common apart from their identification with others who share their distorted view of the world and their idea of being part of something bigger. [...]

"The fight for the kind of world that most people want can, in the end, only be won in a different battle - a battle of values and ideas."

These are fine words of the sort we've come to expect from Benn, but where are the mainstream voices that disagree with those points? More importantly, amongst those values and ideas must be zero-tolerance of terrorism. So, just as we've had a War Against Want, and "wars" ("Crusades", even) against poverty, perhaps the "war on terror" is a rhetorical device that concentrates our minds on the problem, and that shouldn't be suppressed, or abandoned to hawks.

AC Grayling, in an article that finds it difficult not to drift off into irrelevance, offers the alternative: "peace-making on the various problems part of whose outcome is terrorism". It's hard to disagree with that goal, but it manages to incorporate the word "terrorism" without any negative connotation, and as if it were a natural consequence of a disagreement. Just as the "war on terror" device conceals the inevitable requirement for peace-making and diplomacy, Grayling's obscures the necessity that force be employed against terrorists, when all else fails. Moreover, his alone ("... it at least has the merit of being more constructive...") blurs the boundary between rhetoric and real-world politics.

Update (19/04): Once again I find that Norm has covered much the same ground already. He also makes a distinction I should have made:

First of all, choosing violence is not what characterizes terrorist groups, properly defined. It's that they choose violence against civilians targeted more or less at random. [...]